CLIENT CASE STUDY

Leading oil and gas production company: Business process management

Accenture helped this major oil and gas company streamline and optimize its business processes in the wake of a merger.

Overview

The client is the world’s largest deepwater oil and gas producer, with operations in 40 countries and 30,000 employees. The company produces 1.95 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day and about 22 billion BOE in proven resources with 5.6 billion as booked reserves. It is one of the world’s largest net sellers of crude oil, and is a world leader in carbon capture and storage.

Opportunity

In the wake of a merger in 2007, the company found itself managing a host of both legacy and newly inherited business processes, many of which were duplicative or met varying process standards.

These processes were not only designed to differing standards, but also were characterized by several business process management (BPM) tools and environments. This mixture of process standards and technologies hampered the company’s visibility into, and control over, key tasks and workflows—including those related to equipment maintenance, security, environmental protection, and health and safety. In an industry where the compliance of processes and procedures with international safety, health, and environmental regulations is a major concern, the company saw a clear need to improve its BPM capabilities.

Yet, despite an internal initiative aimed at modeling the new entity’s full range of business processes and making them more accessible and manageable, this oil and gas company still had a surplus of process standards and repositories. It was aware of the improvements to efficiency and transparency that would result from a comprehensive transformation of its BPM capabilities. In light of Accenture’s deep BPM experience and central role in the company’s post-merger integration efforts, it approached Accenture for help in bringing its BPM practices up to speed.

Solution

Accenture tapped into its substantial experience, selecting and implementing BPM platforms to support the company’s comprehensive platform selection process. This effort included identifying specific requirements for the new platform, narrowing down the field of potential vendors and platforms to the best possible options, and ultimately selecting IDS Scheer’s ARIS platform.

While helping the company address this immediate need, Accenture concurrently worked with it to achieve several of its longer-term BPM goals. Seeking a more efficient, standardized, best-practice approach to BPM, the company set out to create a global BPM Center of Excellence (CoE) to act as a single internal source of high-quality BPM services. Accenture worked closely with it to create this new CoE, establishing optimized internal standards for process management and developing roles and setting requirements for the center’s staff.

In addition to addressing these near-term BPM challenges, the company asked Accenture to help establish an end-to-end BPM strategy that would help the company address its future needs. An important element of this strategic BPM plan is its enterprise architecture: the process models and application landscapes underpinning the company’s processes for the foreseeable future. To ensure that the enterprise architecture can support the company’s business processes adequately, Accenture currently is helping the company identify the most critical IT capabilities and information concepts.

Results

Offshore oil and gas companies’ long-term success depends upon careful control of, and visibility into, the compliance of their most important processes with health, security and environmental requirements. As a result of its work with Accenture, the company has taken a major step forward in this area. Its newly harmonized and unified business processes have improved the transparency of these key processes and their compliance with rules and regulations. This, in turn, reduces the company’s risk, as well as the amount of time and effort it must spend ensuring process compliance.

The company’s new BPM approach and assets have increased its efficiency and effectiveness while augmenting the impact of its post-merger cost reduction activities. In addition, the company is replacing four existing BPM tools with one best-of-breed solution based on the BPM strategy that Accenture helped develop—which will not only reduce the company’s BPM tools costs, but also will provide greater visibility into ongoing cost-savings opportunities in other process areas.

The company’s new BPM CoE has also has generated cost savings and efficiency by allowing the company to right-size its BPM staff and establish a single point of contact for process improvement proposals and other BPM initiatives.

Most importantly, Accenture has helped the company ensure that these advances are “baked into” its corporate DNA and will drive efficient and globally consistent operations for years to come. Its new BPM platform, CoE and strategy have helped the company embed a “process of process management” as well as the ability to improve its BPM practices continuously. In short, by teaming with Accenture, this oil and gas producer has gained a powerful new capability that supports its long-term pursuit of high performance.

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